by Edward Gross
RICHARD TAYLOR
One of the most difficult things that I had to do on the whole film—that was mind-blowingly difficult—is that freaking glowing thing on Ilia’s neck. You couldn’t track it digitally like today, it had to be done practically. She had a shaved head, no hair to hide any wires or anything, and it’s got to glow. So what it was was a prop that we designed, and we had multiples of these things that fit on her neck, and there were two tiny tungsten wires, like a hair, and they went around the back to a battery pack that was behind her. You would get like two takes of a shot before you had to change the whole thing out.
RICHARD H. KLINE
In terms of story point, it was supposed to be a sensor light, a direct feed to what was controlling her. It was about the size of a nickel and twice as thick, and we would have to stick it onto her throat in the cavity above the chest and then run two wires around to her back where there was a battery. That poor girl was taped and untaped more times than a Rams linebacker is before and after games during their entire career. She would stand for hours while we applied these various devices to her.
PERSIS KHAMBATTA
One of the highlights of the film for me was working with Robert Wise. I learned to trust him. He understood that I was a newcomer and that I had a role that wasn’t easy. It was a difficult part for me. Once I became a probe, I couldn’t blink and that jewel in my neck burned me. They had to put a switch up my arm so I could turn it off. I would try not to switch it off until the lines were complete, because I didn’t want to spoil a good scene. Robert Wise was so patient. If the light in the jewel didn’t work, he would have to wait three or four hours to reshoot the scene. It was a delicate little device.
RICHARD TAYLOR
If I was directing the movie, I’d say, “Look, she has the thing but then it turns itself off and falls away and it goes under her skin—some way she doesn’t have to wear this the whole time.” Because to make that thing on her neck glow was slowing the production down like crazy, and they’re, like, “Taylor, have you got that fucking thing working?” And I’m like, “Fuck me! Who came up with this idea?”
WALTER KOENIG
Persis had a very refreshing narcissism. She was very candid about it. She thought she looked beautiful and she was the first to mention it. That was okay, she did look great.
DOUG DREXLER (special effects makeup, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
When we snuck on the lot during production, my friend and I were coming around the corner, and she walked right by us with that real short white dress, with these amazing legs, and she just looked at us and smiled and said, “Hi, boys.” We almost melted; she looked so beautiful.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
The only thing I remember about her is why the hell did they shave her head? What a stupid thing to do! That was Roddenberry’s idea.
STEPHEN COLLINS (actor, “Will Decker”)
When I was auditioning, I asked them if they could send me a script and they said they couldn’t. “We can’t let it out of the studio.” They took me to Paramount and ushered me into a sort of cell where I was allowed to read the script. It was like one of those scenes in All the President’s Men where they say, “Okay, you can look at that, but only for half an hour and we’ll be watching.”
I was completely unfamiliar with Star Trek. Not out of antipathy, but just because I had somehow missed it. I was not among the devoted, but I had heard it was going to be a big movie. I was just curious about it as I would be about anything that comes to my attention. I liked Gene Roddenberry so much immediately. He’s a wonderful combination of being remarkably articulate and well-spoken and yet he has the kind of innocence of a three-year-old. He’s just like talking to a big kid.
Gene did not work closely on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, although he did work very hard on it. There was a difficult political situation where I felt that Gene was being kept outside the reach of the film. There was a feeling like, “Okay, now we’re making a movie and the people who made the TV show can only help us so much.” Gene was professional about it. He was absolutely wonderful to work with, but he didn’t have final say on many things. Television is an executive producer’s medium, but on a film it’s the director’s medium, and Bob Wise was really calling the shots. Gene was around most of the time, but things were taken out of his hands.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
It was really dumb of Collins to say that Gene wasn’t involved enough. He was involved too much and that was the problem.
STEPHEN COLLINS
What I didn’t know when I signed on for the movie was that Bill Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had script approval. They had the power to bend the story however they wanted. The story had to end with Decker merging with Ilia, but the original scenario was much more centered on Decker. I’m not saying that it weakened the final product—there were other reasons for that—but it weakened my role in it considerably. Decker was not very well-rounded and became sort of two-dimensional and uninteresting.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
That stuff about Nimoy and Shatner having script control is totally inaccurate. As for Mr. Collins, I know that I went out of my way to make him comfortable. I asked for his suggestions concerning his part, because it was his big break and I liked him. He forgets, I suppose, that he made a point of telling people how helpful I was to him and how much he appreciated me for it. So I don’t know where he gets off making those remarks. Either his memory fails him or he finds it expedient for his career to sound off in that thoughtless manner.
At the center of the story of the film were significant arcs for Kirk and Spock. Kirk, who feels he is disappearing into a Starfleet desk job, is desperate to get back in a command seat, and so obsessed with doing so that he makes some glaring mistakes upon retaking command. Spock—who, when we meet him early on, is back on his home world of Vulcan—is attempting to purge himself of the remnants of human emotions within. Sensing V’ger, and the belief that it holds the key to his metaphysical search, he rejoins the Enterprise crew and, over the course of the story, actually learns to embrace his human half. Both are significant character stories, but focusing on those characters—and the interactions that were a hallmark of the original television series—was difficult given the nature of V’ger and the film’s focus on visual effects.
DeFOREST KELLEY
I was worried when I saw the script, because the characterizations were not there, and the relationships were not there. I was disturbed, and so were Bill and Leonard. We had to put up a great fight. I think anyone will tell you that if the actors hadn’t fought like hell to reestablish those relationships, they never would have been there. We would have had a special-effects war. So there was a great deal of difficulty with the script, which was finally resolved to a certain extent. I still don’t think there’s enough of the interpersonal relationships in there, and I regret that some of them were lost. But Paramount didn’t believe that the characters were as important to the public as they really were, and we couldn’t tell them.
There was a scene where Spock, McCoy, and Kirk meet to discuss Spock’s strange behavior. To me, that was the closest thing to a real Star Trek confrontation that there was in the picture. Here the three of us came together, Spock comes in to talk about his problems and what’s going to happen to him, and I have the line, “Well, you’re lucky we just happen to be going your way.” The three of us were actually very natural; that’s where we should be, and what we should be doing. It was somewhat like going back in time.
LEONARD NIMOY
That was a tough time. It was complicated, it was somewhat schizophrenic for a while, and it was not an easy jump back into Spock’s skin. Particularly because there were writing issues. The script that I read for the movie did not even contain the Spock character, so it was a case of them describing to me what Spock would be doing in the next draft of the script. That took a little time, and a little fine-tuning to finally get it to fruition. I was never totally satisfied with that movie
.
JON POVILL
In truth, part of the blame for this goes to Harold, because he didn’t really know the characters. The interaction between the characters was, I think, more rigid than it had been in the series. Harold’s military background and military perspective was such that it was more clipped and military and less personal than it had been in the show. I think that that rests on Harold.
ROBERT WISE
It wasn’t as if somebody sat down at the beginning and said, “Listen, we want to get a lot more special effects.” It was not a deliberate move to shift the emphasis from one area to another. That was really because of the story. That was the script, or the story we had to tell, and we didn’t try to put more special effects in it. I didn’t try. None of us tried. We had people reacting to things that were happening on the screen, so we had to show these things. So if there is a valid criticism coming from those Trekkies who really love these characters with all their heart, there still wasn’t anything we could do about it. We would have had to have a totally different story.
LEONARD NIMOY
Star Trek I—which filmed for six months—was really a trial for the actors, because we were not very much in it at all. We were, much of the time, looking off camera at things that would later be done by Doug Trumbull or his crew. We were looking in wonderment and awe and saying things like, “What do you think it is?” “I don’t know” “What do you think it is going to do next?” “I don’t know!” Very exciting stuff.
GENE RODDENBERRY
This is the first time a television show ever became a major motion picture, and Robert Wise did a remarkable job in adaptation from one medium to another. Many people don’t seem to be aware that they’re two entirely different mediums. You strive for different values in television. It’s a more intimate medium, where you can get into multiple characters and character conflict that can be very exciting. With motion pictures the trend has been to make it a sensory experience with stereo sound and bigger screens. Television cannot create that illusion, so it goes for other things. It intellectualizes rather than sensorizes the product. And a major motion picture spectacle doesn’t lend itself easily to Mr. Spock’s cute little remarks with Captain Kirk. The conversion of a two-hour television show into a movie was much more difficult than anyone could’ve believed.
And the difficulties regarding the script continued right to the last moment, when a battle erupted between Livingston and Roddenberry over credit, with Alan Dean Foster caught in the cross fire.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
The writing credits for the film proposed to the Writers Guild by Paramount was “screenplay by Harold Livingston and story by Alan Dean Foster.” They left Roddenberry out, so he protested. He’s the one who launched the protest. I knew he couldn’t win an arbitration, because it wasn’t his script. Anything he’d done was tossed out, or most of it. In any case, I blackjacked Foster into splitting the story credit with Gene. He agreed to do it and Gene wouldn’t accept it. On that basis, I said, “Okay, Gene, screw you. We’ll go to arbitration.” When I said that, he withdrew and he withdrew in a funk. He was mad.
GENE RODDENBERRY
It was my policy all through Star Trek: If a writer felt he wanted credit and wanted it badly enough to have a Guild action on it, I’d withdraw.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I said to Gene, “If you felt you deserved credit, then you have a system for determining this. Why didn’t you use it?” He said, “I don’t want to lower myself to that.” At that point, I guess, he decided to withdraw and assume this injured pose. But he would have lost this arbitration, because he didn’t write any script. All he did was rewrite, patch up, fool around, and screw everything up.
JON POVILL
Gene didn’t deserve coscreenplay credit. The credit arbitration procedure is that they heavily favor the writer of the first draft, and Harold wrote the first draft. Unless you drastically change something, you’re not going to get credit.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
The first thing they did was try to deny me screen credit. When the credits came out to be filed with the Guild, they read, “screenplay by Gene Roddenberry and Harold Livingston, story by Gene Roddenberry.” I’m a very low-key guy. I’m a handshake-is-my-bond kind of guy. I called my agent and said, “What’s going on?” And she said, “Oh, that’s nothing.” “What do you mean, that’s nothing?” “Nobody’s mad at you or anything, that’s just the business.” I said, “Well, it’s not my business.” My agent then suggested I file for solo story credit. I said, “Sure,” because I did 98 percent of the writing on the treatment.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I told Foster, “Just because Roddenberry is being a son of a bitch doesn’t mean that you have to be one, too.”
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
I thought about it and said, “You’re right.” I called and said, “Look, all I’m interested in here is having it read the way it read on the earlier script, which is ‘story by Alan Dean Foster and Gene Roddenberry,’” because it was, as I freely admit, based on his one-page idea. I then get this very strange letter back saying that Gene Roddenberry is off in La Costa someplace recuperating, he’s very tired, very busy, and he really doesn’t have time for this. I just laughed. Is this real life or kindergarten? I just threw up my hands and said, “Fine, whatever,” and that’s why I have sole story credit on the movie.
JON POVILL
I had miscalculated tremendously by not going for a story credit on the film. Harold was telling me that I absolutely should, but I was trying to salvage my relationship with Gene by not going for it. I felt badly for Gene that he had originally wanted coscreenplay credit with Harold, and Harold assured him that he would fight him to the death on it. So Gene was in for story credit and Harold said that was okay. I didn’t want to apply for story credit and have any chance of fucking up that credit for Gene. Then, of course, he took his name off of it. That would have been a lot of residuals over the years.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
By then I’d worked with Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas [on Star Wars novels]. In a nutshell, Roddenberry was standard Hollywood and George Lucas was anti-Hollywood. I never got the feeling from George that he particularly cared whether he received any great critical acclaim or even if he made a lot of money. I got the feeling that Star Wars was based on something he loved seeing as a kid and that’s what he wanted to make and he hoped he could make it so he could see it on the screen. I don’t think he cared about the fame or the money. Dealing with Lucas was like dealing with the quiet kid in the back of the class who hardly ever speaks up. Gene was, like, “I’M STAR TREK!”
On December 6, 1979, one day before its official debut, the forty-four-million-dollar Star Trek: The Motion Picture had its world premiere in Washington, DC, at the K-B MacArthur Theater, followed by a black-tie reception at the National Air and Space Museum. There had been no previews and, as a result, Wise, who began his career as the editor on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, considered the film’s release version nothing more than a “rough cut.” The following day, the vast majority of critics would attack the film for its—according to many—listless pacing and overreliance on visual effects over character interactions.
EDDIE EGAN
I was sent along with many other people from the New York and L.A. offices of Paramount to Washington, DC. One of my duties there was to ride in a limo to pick up Robert Wise and his wife at the airport and to bring them to a hotel and get them settled in for the premiere the next night. He actually got off the plane with two cans of film under his arm.
He was a very kind man, but I could tell he was troubled and frustrated and just exhausted from the process. I was with him the next day when he did a round of interviews and then went with him and his wife to the premiere and stayed with them at the party afterwards.
WALTER KOENIG
Gene had just seen the cut and it was literally still wet. We were flying to Washington, DC, and I asked, “What do you thin
k of the picture?” He answered, “It’s a good picture.” It was a death knell. As soon as he said that, I knew it wasn’t going to work. He didn’t put it down, he didn’t denigrate it, but I heard it in his voice. I absolutely knew. Then you hope against hope that it’s going to be good, and you see the limousines and the red carpets and the spotlights. Then you see those first five minutes with the music and you see V’ger and the destruction it causes. I got very excited, but shortly thereafter I began to become aware of time, that time was passing. That I wasn’t involved in the picture. I was sitting in the audience and my heart sank.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
At the premiere, Roddenberry got up onstage and thanked Bob Wise and virtually everybody, but never once mentioned my name. Bill Shatner got up and said, “Listen, let’s not forget Harold Livingston, who wrote this fine picture,” which got me a nice round of applause. It was a very nice and big thing of him to do.
DOUG DREXLER
I remember Roddenberry and Harold Livingston at the premiere sitting together very quietly. Roddenberry was sweating. He literally was sweating. He looked very uncomfortable and knew that he had a problem. The print, I had overheard somebody say, was flown in wet. The movie was never really finished.
SUSAN SACKETT
The only thing I remember from the premiere in Washington was a little display case that had actual moon rocks in it and being fascinated by them. It was everybody’s dream come true to come to a premiere and be treated like royalty.
EDDIE EGAN
My most vivid memory of the night of the premiere was when the picture ended, Leonard Nimoy went down the aisle to Todd Ramsay, the editor, and said, “I need to speak to you,” in a very certain tone that he was unhappy about something. I found out later from my dealings with Leonard that he was unhappy that the scene where Spock cried, which was put back in for the director’s edition, had been taken out of the movie. That was what had really ticked him off that night, because all of them were seeing the movie for the first time, including the director.